Troubled R.I. nonprofit bought Bald Head property

Wednesday

Feb 29, 2012 at 2:33 PM

The Institute for International Sport – embroiled in scandal – purchased Bald Head Island property.

By Tom MooneyThe Providence Journal

Providence, RI | In 1983, a Texas oil millionaire bought much of an isolated barrier island at the mouth of Cape Fear River and began developing an exclusive resort that two decades later proved, it seems, irresistible to Daniel Doyle Jr. Over a span of eight months beginning in October 2004, Doyle's publicly supported nonprofit corporation, the Institute for International Sport – now embroiled in financial scandal – purchased two vacation homes and four house lots for a total $2.95 million on Bald Head Island, real estate records show. During that period, the institute received hundreds of thousands of dollars in Rhode Island state grants. At the same time, it owed the University of Rhode Island, where it is based, close to $200,000, a debt that has since grown to $380,000. Months earlier Doyle had also begun buying up island property under his own name or that of Aberdeen Investments, a company he had formed with a college classmate, Deborah Burch. Starting in February 2004, as wild land speculation flared across the three-mile-long island, Doyle bought five other lots either himself, with Burch or through Aberdeen. The lots ranged in price from $238,000 to $450,000 each. Their total purchase price: $1,396,500. In a little more than three years, records show, Doyle or the institute had bought 11 pieces of property on Bald Head Island for $4.3 million. In 2009, as its debt to the university grew, Doyle offered the institute's properties as collateral in a payment plan. Since then, as the national real estate crisis took hold, the values of the properties plummeted. Two of the Institute's properties have been foreclosed upon. Three more are in foreclosure. The University of Rhode Island has had a relationship with Doyle since 1986 when the former basketball coach at Trinity College, in Hartford, opened on the Kingston campus the Institute for International Sport, promoting world peace through youth sports. But now Doyle and the Institute are at the center of a state police investigation after a state audit revealed the institute owes the university more than $380,000 and cannot account for most of a $575,000 legislative grant for constructing a residential coaching and training center on campus – still unfinished five years later. Last week, troopers executed a search warrant at the institute's headquarters and removed computers and boxes of documents.Since the audit, other revelations have emerged, including the alleged forgery of philanthropist Alan Hassenfeld's signature on an institute document and a questionable list of members to the institute's board of directors over the years.